A Little Spring Warmth......

I'm writing this on Thursday evening wrapped in a blanket with a hot water bottle on my feet, after spending the day putting coats and hats on and off, shutting doors after children and keeping active to stop the 14C temperature in my house getting to me!! What a change from Tuesday when it was glorious all day, and the back door stood open all afternoon - the thermometer in the house was still reading 14C but I wasn't interested as I was sitting in the garden in a sheltered spot soaking up the sunshine and feeling rather Springlike!!

The children relished the warmth and rapidly shed outer layers to invent pulley systems with ropes o the climbing frame (which they can't actually play on due to the huge stack of wooden cabin pieces stacked underneath it waiting to be built into said cabin).....

Dewi cracked on with his garden to-do list which pretty much resembles my lists in that as one job is ticked off, another one (or two) is added..... he is cutting pieces to box in the new raised veg planter that has been installed......

Faith got creative with the off cuts - this is a swordfish she tells me...... or a sawdust fish as she assembled it underneath where Dewi was cutting wood..... after getting sawdust in her eye she spent the rest of the afternoon with her goggles on..... wish I'd got a picture of that!!

Idris thoroughly enjoyed digging and didn't seem to have dug up too many things that we actually wanted IN the soil.....

Here is the veg planter - it was helping to move this beast over the fence that ended up in broken rib in January - ahem....... it will be worth it to garden at waist height!! And help to hide the ugly pebble dash garage that next door erected two years ago.....

And what was I busy doing? Well it's a tough assignment but someone has to sit still and keep an eye on everyone!!!

And the weatherman? He says we may be back to this by the weekend - booooooo!

Plastic Bag Butterflies

We had a lovely time today making these plastic bag butterflies - I had the idea from here. It provided lots of opportunities for practising scissor skills, talking about the sizes, shapes and colours of the items going into the bags, using some ordinal numbers, counting and discussing the lengths of strings to hang them from!

Eve experimented by making her pipe cleaner antennae into different twisty shapes....

 Faith carefully chose lots of Easter card toppers to go in her butterflies (we raided all the left over bits and bobs from the bottom of the craft box!!

 This is one of Eve's butterflies.....

 We hung them up from the curtain pole with wool, some high, some low......

 Idris really loved looking at them when I held him up to show them to him, and I have to admit, although very simple to make, they are very effective! My little mindee let me hang one up and took one home to her Mum!!

An Easter Tree

This has been on my Spring activities list for years but somehow it just never happened! I begged hard for some twisty hazel twigs but my dear husband stood firm and I had to be satisfied with apple twigs! I have a package of tiny wooden Easter decorations to hang on them nearer Easter (also had for years and not used!!).

To adorn our tree we made teeny acorn nests with coloured eggs made from oven-bake clay. I had to glue them into the 'nests' when ready and then glued the nests onto a piece of pipe cleaner to twist around the tree. The Girls made birds to sit atop their nests of eggs and didn't want theirs glued in as if you lift the birds out you can see their eggs stuck underneath!!!!

Making Sock Rabbits!

We made these really sweet sock bunnies last week. I made them at a 'Messy Church' update evening that I went to with our Vicar and Youth Worker a few weeks back. I knew the girls would love them even though the practise run I made on the evening looked a tad scary! They are really simple:

Flatten out a sock and cut from the toe to the heel up the centre. Make sure you choose a sock that has an equal amount of 'foot' to 'heel' as ankle socks won't work (as I found out the hard way!)

Turn the sock inside out and tie a tight knot in the top of the sock then turn it back the right way around (this is the rabbit's bottom!). Fill the sock with rice or beans up to the base of the cut - not too tight full as you need to be able to mould it.

Tie a double knot in the cut toe parts - and arrange the ears as desired! use a ribbon/cord or pipe cleaner to tie around the middle of the rabbit's body to differentiate between the head and the body.

Add some eyes and a nose - we used gems and beads but you could use googly eyes or fabric or buttons. once dry - play away but beware, you will be picking up bits of rice from random corners around your house for weeks!!!!

Making Wildflower Seed Bombs!

Faith and I tried making a batch of these yesterday so that we were ready pre-pared for the Home Education group today where we are running this as an activity for others to try out! They don't look that attractive in the pictures but they are packed full of British Hedgerow Wildflower seeds, varieties that will grow in semi-shade, and so carry the potential to be really beautiful! I can't remember where I saw the idea but it comes from the 'guerilla gardening' movement where people go under cover of darkness usually to garden derelict areas and make them beautiful and more useful for wildlife. I believe the original bombs were much larger and made from clay and compost but our version is made from recycled paper pulp! Here's how we did them:

Sheets of newspaper torn into small pieces and soaked in water (we found that four sheets of a tabloid sized paper filled one of our ice-cube trays)......

We then blended a large spoonful at a time with about a half-pint more water so as to be kind to our blender!

This was the result - sloppy paper pulp that Faith had fun playing with!

We mixed a tablespoonful of the wildflower seed into the pulp and stirred it in well then tipped the mix into a muslin cloth tied over a large pan. We twisted the cloth up and hand-squeezed as much water as possible out of the mix.

We took small amounts of the pulp and pushied it into the ice-cube compartments, squeezing any more water out as we went. They were a little tricky to get out of this ice-cube tray - I think that a silicone one would be easier to use, and it would make some fun shapes as well! Once popped out we lined them up on the radiators to dry as they need to be completely dry for storage or the seeds will try to germinate prematurely!

I remembered too late for this batch that when we made paper we added coloured tissue paper and it turned the paper purple, so tomorrow I'm going to try adding yellow and orange tissue paper for a Spring-like look!

Once dried these can be put into a bag and carried with you on a walk or drive and chucked into the base of a hegerow where the seeds will hopefully germinate and the flowers will grow! This was why I chose the native wildflower seeds as so many hedgerows have been lost, reducing the number of habitats for insects, birds and animals and particularly affecting butterflies. This is a fun way to try and redress the balance - we are going to try and 'bomb' our local canal-side hedges with these!

Mini Daffs For Mother's Day!

I have had this packet of miniature daffodil bulbs tucked away for months, ready for when I went back to work. I returned to work as a child minder later than planned for various reasons and so late that the bulbs were growing in the bag! We finally got them potted up and I hope that they will flower in time to give as Mother's day gifts but if not then all good intentions were there!



We started by hammering holes into the bottom of clean food tins with a hammer and nails - Dewi did this with them and had his thumb hammered a few times by accident!

The girls filled them almost full with compost then added the bulbs before tucking a little bit more compost around the tops and sides of the bulbs to make sure that there were no air pockets. A little bit of water and a sunny window sill finished them off for now and we will decorate the tins nearer to Mother's Day before giving them to various Mummies and deserving others!! There were a few left over so I tucked them in my garden to keep the crocuses and snowdrops company!!